The design and implementation of Zap: a system for migrating computing environments

ABSTRACT

We have created Zap, a novel system for transparent migration of legacy and networked applications. Zap provides a thin virtualization layer on top of the operating system that introduces pods, which are groups of processes that are provided a consistent, virtualized view of the system. This decouples processes in pods from dependencies to the host operating system and other processes on the system. By integrating Zap virtualization with a checkpoint-restart mechanism, Zap can migrate a pod of processes as a unit among machines running independent operating systems without leaving behind any residual state after migration. We have implemented a Zap prototype in Linux that supports transparent migration of unmodified applications without any kernel modifications. We demonstrate that our Linux Zap prototype can provide general-purpose process migration functionality with low overhead. Our experimental results for migrating pods used for running a standard user's X windows desktop computing environment and for running an Apache web server show that these kinds of pods can be migrated with subsecond checkpoint and restart latencies.

REFERENCES

• 1: http://www.vmware.com, VMware, Inc.
• 2: NFS: Network File System Protocol Specification, RFC1094, Sun Microsystems, Inc., March 1989.
• 3: Using the RDTSC Instruction for Performance Monitoring, Pentium II Processor Application Notes, Intel Corporation, 1997.
• 4: The Volano Report, Volano LLC, December 2001. http://www.volano.com/report
• 5: K. Amiri, D. Petrou, G. Ganger, and G. Gibson, Dynamic Function Placement in Active Storage Clusters, Technical Report CMU-CS-99-140, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, June 1999.
• 6: Y. Artsy, Y. Chang, and R. Finkel, Interprocess Communication in Charlotte, IEEE Software: 22--28, January 1987.
• 7: A. Barak and R. Wheeler, MOSIX: An Integrated Multiprocessor UNIX, Proceedings of the USENIX Winter 1989 Technical Conference, pp. 101--112, San Diego, CA, February 1989.
• 8: P. Bhagwat, C. Perkins, and S. K. Tripathi, Network Layer Mobility: an Architecture and Survey, IEEE Personal Communication, 3(3): 54--64, June 1996.
• 9: Tom Boyd , Partha Dasgupta, Process Migration: A Generalized Approach Using a Virtualizing Operating System, Proceedings of the 22 nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'02), p.385, July 02-05, 2002
• 10: J. Casas, D. L. Clark, R. Conuru, S. W. Otto, R. M. Prouty, and J. Walpole, MPVM: A Migration Transparent Version of PVM, Computing Systems, 8(2): 171--216, 1995.
• 11: David Cheriton, The V distributed system, Communications of the ACM, v.31 n.3, p.314-333, March 1988 [doi>10.1145/42392.42400]
• 12: Fred Douglis , John Ousterhout, Transparent process migration: design alternatives and the sprite implementation, Software—Practice & Experience, v.21 n.8, p.757-785, Aug. 1991 [doi>10.1002/spe.4380210802]
• 13: I. Foster and C. Kesselman, Globus: A Metacomputing Infrastructure Toolkit, Proceedings of the Workshop on Environments and Tools for Parallel Scientific Computing, Lyon, France, August 1996.
• 14: Andrew S. Grimshaw , Wm. A. Wulf , CORPORATE The Legion Team, The Legion vision of a worldwide virtual computer, Communications of the ACM, v.40 n.1, p.39-45, Jan. 1997 [doi>10.1145/242857.242867]
• 15: T. Hain, Architectural Implications of NAT, RFC2993, IETF, November 2000.
• 16: M. Holdrege and P. Srisuresh, Protocol Complications with the IP Network Address Translator, RFC3027, IETF, January 2001.
• 17: D. B. Johnson and C. Perkins, Mobility Support in IPv6, draft-ietf-mobileip-ipv6-16.txt, IETF, March 2002.
• 18: Anthony D. Joseph , Joshua A. Tauber , M. Frans Kaashoek, Mobile Computing with the Rover Toolkit, IEEE Transactions on Computers, v.46 n.3, p.337-352, March 1997 [doi>10.1109/12.580429]
• 19: E. Jul, Migration of Light-weight Processes in Emerald, IEEE Technical Committee on Operating Systems Newsletter, 3(1): 20--23, 1989.
• 20: Jaeyeon Jung , Emil Sit , Hari Balakrishnan , Robert Morris, DNS performance and the effectiveness of caching, Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Internet Measurement, November 01-02, 2001, San Francisco, California, USA [doi>10.1145/505202.505223]
• 21: Michael Kozuch , M. Satyanarayanan, Internet Suspend/Resume, Proceedings of the Fourth IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, p.40, June 20-21, 2002
• 22: M. Litzkow, T. Tannenbaum, J. Basney, and M. Livny, Checkpoint and Migration of UNIX Processes in the Condor Distributed Processing System, Technical Report #1346, University of Wisconsin Madison Computer Sciences, April 1997.
• 23: D. A. Maltz and P. Bhagwat, MSOCKS: An Architecture for Transport Layer Mobility, Proceedings of the IEEE INFOCOM'98, pp. 1037--1045, San Francisco, CA, 1998.
• 24: D. Milojicic, F. Douglis, and R. Wheeler, Mobility: Processes, Computers, and Agents, Addison Wesley Longman, February 1999.
• 25: Sape J. Mullender , Guido van Rossum , Andrew S. Tanenbaum , Robbert van Renesse , Hans van Staveren, Amoeba: A Distributed Operating System for the 1990s, Computer, v.23 n.5, p.44-53, May 1990 [doi>10.1109/2.53354]
• 26: C. Perkins, IP Mobility Support for IPv4, revised, draft-ietfmobileip-rfc2002-bis-08.txt, Internet Draft, September 2001.
• 27: R. Pike, D. Presotto, K. Thompson, and H. Trickey, Plan 9 from Bell Labs, Proceedings of the Summer 1990 UKUUG Conference, pp. 1--9, London, July 1990.
• 28: J. S. Plank, M. Beck, G. Kingsley, and K. Li, Libckpt: Transparent Checkpointing under Unix, Proceedings of Usenix Winter 1995 Technical Conference, pp. 213--223, New Orleans, LA, January 1995.
• 29: Jim Pruyne , Miron Livny, Managing Checkpoints for Parallel Programs, Proceedings of the Workshop on Job Scheduling Strategies for Parallel Processing, p.140-154, April 16, 1996
• 30: X. Qu, J. X. Yu, and R. P. Brent, A Mobile TCP Socket, International Conference on Software Engineering (SE '97), San Francisco, CA, November 1997.
• 31: Richard F. Rashid , George G. Robertson, Accent: A communication oriented network operating system kernel, Proceedings of the eighth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.64-75, December 14-16, 1981, Pacific Grove, California, United States
• 32: Tristan Richardson , Quentin Stafford-Fraser , Kenneth R. Wood , Andy Hopper, Virtual Network Computing, IEEE Internet Computing, v.2 n.1, p.33-38, January 1998 [doi>10.1109/4236.656066]
• 33: Marc Rozier, Chorus, Proceedings of the Workshop on Micro-kernels and Other Kernel Architectures, p.39-70, April 27-28, 1992
• 34: R. Russell, Linux 2.4 Packet Filtering HOWTO, Linux Netfilter Core Team, November 2001. http://netfilter.samba.org/
• 35: Constantine P. Sapuntzakis , Ramesh Chandra , Ben Pfaff , Jim Chow , Monica S. Lam , Mendel Rosenblum, Optimizing the migration of virtual computers, Proceedings of the 5th symposium on Operating systems design and implementation

  Due to copyright restrictions we are not able to make the PDFs for this conference available for downloading

  , December 09-11, 2002, Boston, Massachusetts [doi>10.1145/1060289.1060324]
• 36: Brian Keith Schmidt , Monica S. Lam, Supporting ubiquitous computing with stateless consoles and computation caches, 2000
• 37: D. Senie, Network Address Translator (NAT)-Friendly Application Design Guidelines, RFC3235, IETF, January 2002.
• 38: Alex C. Snoeren , Hari Balakrishnan, An end-to-end approach to host mobility, Proceedings of the 6th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, p.155-166, August 06-11, 2000, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/345910.345938]
• 39: G. Su and J. Nieh, Mobile Communication with Virtual Network Address Translation, Technical Report CUCS-003-02, Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, February 2002.
• 40: P. Vixie, S. Thomson, Y. Rekhter, and J. Bound, Dynamic Updates in the Domain Name System (DNS UPDATE), RFC2136, IETF, April 1997.
• 41: A "persistent connection" model for mobile and distributed systems, Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks, p.300, September 20-23, 1995
• 42: H. Zhong and J. Nieh, CRAK: Linux Checkpoint/Restart As a Kernel Module, Technical Report CUCS-014-01, Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, November 2001.